Body Bags

Body Bag Script

Who let in the rain.

Everything in my apartment is a body bag.

The bugs can’t get there, like when id drown myself hoping to get rid of it.

Get rid of the bugs in my hair while my mom watched from the shore. And my dad said a week later, one weaker late, that your hair holds onto oxygen. That you can’t kill bugs like that.

The Oxygen Affect is the name of a movie I made in my dreams. It consisted of a man holding a woman captive in a womb. he’d pump it full of oxygen so that she slept all the time and then he’d visit her to make love, by lubing himself up and traveling through the tubes.

She was me. She was lovely and nude and exhausted. She didn’t care that he was sidled up next to her while she slept in her wet.

Im pretty sure I made it in reaction to “the human centipede,” a film where a doctor attaches travelers by their intestinal tract but never really gets that far. I don’t think.

Im not going to watch this movie because my brother already did.

Wandering is loss of control?

Wandering is to wonder in the past tense.

There is no wonder outside of my bags. hair lack luster, without shine, a brutal coat.

I guess. Im guessing. Like my friend Amy who seems to know, but uses the term “guessing” or “maybe” in a way that shapes a form. Her forms made of many. Placeholders for death, nodding to a life that she knows about because it exists all around her. There’s no canal to get there though. There’s no structure. Or there’s only structure. Structure to find the suture.

I love cindy lauper and as I find my way back to the 90s, when I first loved women with other women. I find that there is something to be said for her serious political edge and melodrama. Her grace Kelly style and problematic puffy eyebrow skin.

There’s something to be said for the way punky Brewster normalized my fantasies of fatherly love and decadence in color. There’s something to be said for the bag, isolation of cloth and wood, that holds the bug tightly like a fist until it plugs itself with fashion and style and wanderings.

But there’s not much to be said for the clarity one assumes in sheer blue or black plastic. Punctured. They remain the color of fake bruises and pretty waitress vains.

There’s not much to say about protrusions in ones scars or the feel of a punch.

Fig. 1.

Body Bag: Protecting, 2011. Scanned tearsheet printout, print protector, clip and nail, 20 × 25 in.

Fig. 2.

Body Bag: Smell Shell, 2011. Handwritten note, plastic bag, seashell, pushpin, dimensions variable.

Fig. 3.

Body Bag: Smell Shell, 2011 (detail). Handwritten note, plastic bag, seashell, pushpin, dimensions variable.

Fig. 4.

Body Bag: Get Out, 2011. Photograph printout, print protector, clip and nail, 20 × 25 in.